BREAKING NEWS

Sunday Times selects Robert Redford: The Biography by Michael Feeney Callan

as one of its Best Books of 2011

(Source: Sunday Times Culture Supplement November 27, 2011)

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream

Of many a brave unbodied scheme...

Audacity - reverence. These must mate,

And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,

To wrestle with the angel - Art.”

Herman Melville, Art

A LETTER FROM MICHAEL: THE WRITER'S LIFE

CURATING Part 1: WEBCASTING FROM THE RABBIT HOLE

The great privilege of creativity is the challenge to change things. On a personal level it has been invigorating to move from the hectic schedule of promoting my biography of Robert Redford (the joyful coast-to-coast US tour for Random House this summer), to writing and directing again for film. And the “film” this time is something very unique and ambitious which owes its origins to my 15 years in Redford’s world.  Redford’s Sundance was all about providing support for independent filmmakers. When I finished the marathon book, my focus was with the role and rights of creativity. Out of that catalytic moment came the creation of BOBCOM.com, the online Birth of Brilliance Community. Entertainment media are fast-changing with the growth of IT science and this, in turn, affects the capacity of the arts. “Convergence” is the new buzz word. It simply means the fusing of the new technologies with conventional production, broadcast and distribution paradigms. The internet is the revolution. It is the most powerful democratic tool ever invented, and its value for artists is immense. BOBCOM.com offers a multi-media platform to liberate artists. Initially it features musicians and is an unabashed tackle upon the early-established websites that continue institutional trends of over-exploiting the artist; ultimately, BOBCOM aims to create programmes for artists in other media, in the visual arts and in writing. BOBCOM launched with an Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass carnival on Bobfire Night, November 1, 2010, at Hoxton Square in London, promising a manifesto of change and new-style opportunities for emerging talent. In the twelve months that followed, we placed a new band in Abbey Road Studios to record an album, placed four acts in our BOBCOM Channel 4 television series and launched a 7-hour live-streamed celebration of fifty years of the Beatles at the Cavern. To round off our first year, at Hallowe’en 2011 we partnered with the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts to launch a groundbreaking webcast, The 2UBE, which is presented monthly on BOBCOM.com. For me personally the multi-layered project is a chance to actualise the promise of one of my heroes, Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland not only promoted transcendent joy in the exercise of imagination, but waved an important flag for neglected voices - in his case, the wisdom of seen-but-not-heard Victorian teens. Adopting an Alice figure as BOBCOM’s poster girl was a given but, as writer-director of the film and promotional elements of our project, it has been a blast embedding the acrostics and culture-stimulating tricks that Carroll stuck in Alice. The internet, I firmly believe, needn’t be semi-literate slurry. It’s a scribble board, for sure. But because it is it represents the perfect canvas for new artists to take back control. My dedication in the months to come will be to push the boundaries of BOBCOM to inspire, support and showcase new artists who are free to say what they say and do what they do. The world needs change.

CURATING Part 2: WRITING IN THE COMMON ROOM

Read the reviews on the BOOKS tab.

SCRAPBOOK: REDFORD TOUR & DIRECTING BOBCOM

Pages from Mike’s album: Top, left to right: The Redford book tour 1) The American Film Institute Theater, Silver Spring, Maryland, June, 2011; 2) On stage at the AFI, discussing the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; 3) Book signings in San Francisco, June, 2011 .  Second Row, l to r: At work on BOBCOM 1) In the control room in Abbey Road Studios with producer Steve Levine and Banned Sauce; 2) Directing BOBCOM's poster lady Honey Cleaver in Nottingham Forrest, March 2011; 3) Pre-film planning with Pete and Roag Best, at the Casbah Club, Liverpool, July 2011. Bottom Row, l to r: BOBCOM's friends and family 1) With the legendary Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall, September, 2011; 2) With Pete Best and brother Roag, July 2011; 3) With John Lennon's Quarrymen at St Peter's Church Hall, Woolton, the venue where John met Paul, July 2011.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Michael continues to work on a new collection of poetry, which will be published shortly. The Magical Triangle will contain all new poems, written in the period from 2003-2011. Below is a sampler from the work in progress.

DOUGLAS SIRK WITH MY MOTHER AND SON

The span of time a folded fan across an elderly lady’s lap or boys’ toy

The soft and downy horizon, a deer in snow and Jane Wyman’s apple cheeks

So sit down here, surrounded by the technology and phone accounts of
a half a century, sit with Rollo or fruit pastilles and while away the
astonished truth of her and him and Rock and all that came about

Douglas Sirk, anonymously in Lugano by the brown autumnal lake,
By the statues of the undebated greats like Ella, by the stagnant water
off the Roman Rhone. The wind, the harvest, the screen and mezzanine,
the pre-revolutionary politics and Restoration inward look,
the Freud and fan and all the earnest fireside stuff that
substitutes possession.

Aside you I wish to hold your hand, generations popping like
hottub corn, the Christmas beef, the laughing cavaliers: us always.
I wish to hold your hand but, no matter, Douglas Sirk is between us
holding us all, pre and post and all and ever.

Snow falls and - this incantation answered -  it is indeed December.

NOTES FROM A MUNICIPAL FLOWER BED

Parking. Larking on old shores. The mill. The floss of duties. Wait. Go.
The cross. We bear. The striped tiger crossing. The old hands. The boys.
School stripes. Bars. Chocolate wrappers on a dull bookmaker wind.
The drill. The dill drill. The sliding by of busses. Omni. The steam.
Press. The queuey queue for bread or bolls. The cotton. The rotten cotton.
Windows. The sly shine. Ironised women. Mannequins. Promises.
The new. The shiny shutter. The close. The clothes horse. Closing time.
The elongated river. Dry. The tired mouth. The slow foot. The quake.
Rumble. The city mail. Chain mail. Distended duck. A signal sense. Ease.
At last. The park. The part park. The shallow grave. Verdant hush. Bush.
Waves. Wavy bush. The stiff iris. The yellow. The deck. The red. The white.
Accordance with. Sway. Stay. Stop here. A young conversation. The then.
Here and now continuing. Unpark.

ODE TO THE COMMUNITY

1. She goes out

Can of oil beside the milk. A ring of calcium on the step. Knickers
in the hidden air behind a lilac tree. And above like god the spiral
tower of the Mace. 

When she leaves she is dressed for Verdi, up and styled (a little nerdy),
But the morning’s impositions are stemmed by a one-pound charity
book of humanities by Betty Ball.  Scrunch, scuff the heelless Kelly,
the Kelly bag, the waist of jelly. Comes along the corner shop
and takes persistence up a notch to talk to the kid with the cleft pallet.

There are innumerable pieces of paper to be processed because
it is the twenty-second of March.

Out on the coast road her place holds firm pulling at her ankles like
the kraken; sliding out like a skater on an icy winter night she
slides towards town, sliding to the toll remorseless full of dates but sliding.
She has become herself by habit but is aware of the changes in
every finger and toe.
The cemented walls, cheap garrison walls, are tired and crumbling
like the dandruff that pares off her flesh, leaving her in council bushes
To stop and weep for flesh left back, to take a step off the track to
forgo the ambush and wait at a trailer or skip a light or stop a child:
is impossible conjunction, like the wrong newspaper.

It says here:

2. She goes back

O let me lie, let me lie on silk and eat the glass that’s full of me.
O let me.

HELICOPTER IN THE NIGHT

The city is raging in labour, its walls are sand
The hot night is ringing with the devil’s laughter
And William Caxton is burning his hidden books.

The cold of sound presses hard on frayed and fragile windows
Widows fuss for bankbooks in tea kettles
Cats eat corn, babies whine, the white light of a 400 watt bulb.

The sea goes quiet. Fish stall. An arc of anger
Raking across the universe, fahrenheit 452, wr 104, the inferno
It is at last the locust wave, the pestilence, the
unstoppable fear that answers every question.

There’s a banshee on my lawn known to me.